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Help Develop the Heritage Place Inventory

GPS Coordinates Wanted for Tasmanian Heritage Information

Parks and Wildlife Service (PWS) heritage staff are inviting the public and PWS staff to get out their GPSs and lock in the coordinates for heritage sites around the State.

The information will then be loaded into the Tasmanian Heritage Place Inventory (THPI), which is a vital part of conserving our knowledge about Parks-managed heritage places.

The register of heritage places includes buildings, archaeological deposits, submerged features, shipwrecks and cultural landscapes on PWS-managed land that are not necessarily recorded in other listings such as the Tasmanian Heritage Register or Register of the National Estate.

There are over 1100 THPI sites on land managed by PWS, of which about 870 entries are in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. These records are now held within a database - the PWS Information Management System (IMS) - which is used by PWS to aid the management of these heritage sites.

In developing the database, it became apparent that some information about the locations of the sites was either absent or obviously inaccurate. At the suggestion of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Consultative Committee, interested persons are now able to contribute to the accuracy of our GPS co-ordinates for the sites and add to contribute new sites to the inventory.

To aid inclusion of information to the inventory, a form can be downloaded from the PWS website - see below. The form is fairly simple and includes the site name, description and location. The form and photos can be emailed or posted to PWS – we have created an email address, heritage@parks.tas.gov.au for this purpose.

Your input will help update the IMS records to create a much more accurate dataset for management and research purposes.

Tips for recording heritage locations
When taking GPS co-ordinates please take them from the middle of any ‘ruins’ and from the front door of buildings.
If using a GPS please ensure GPS is set to WGS84 as this is the most current and up to date reference system. The Geocentric Datum of Australia (GDA) is the new Australian coordinate system, replacing the Australian Geodetic Datum (AGD). GDA is part of a global coordinate reference frame and is directly compatible with the Global Positioning System (GPS).